Migrating Live Streaming Applications onto Clouds: Challenges and a CloudStorm Solution

Abstract

Live TV production, due to its distributed nature, requires broadcasters to deploy equipments and human resources to several different places. This increases production costs. The traditional method through outside broadcasting vans is expensive. Migrating this type of application onto clouds is a promising method to reduce the cost. However, the Quality of Experience (QoE) can hardly be assured because of the cloud performance uncertainty. Auto-scaling the infrastructure based on dynamic workloads at runtime is also difficult. The feasibility of CloudsStorm framework, which is the core component of SWITCH (Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive Cloud applications) workbench, handling the lifecycle of the time critical application development and performance monitoring, infrastructure planning and provisioning, etc., is demonstrated with the aspect of live events broadcasting. It makes a significant attempt to fill the DevOps gap when migrating applications from legacy systems onto clouds. A live streaming application is demonstrated as a use case example.